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E-grocery trend on rise among urban Indonesians
Laili Damayanti, a stay-at-home mother in Jakarta, rarely goes to traditional markets or supermarkets anymore when she needs fresh fruit
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aili Damayanti, a stay-at-home mother in Jakarta, rarely goes to traditional markets or supermarkets anymore when she needs fresh fruit. Instead, she turns to online grocery delivery services to fulfill her weekly needs.
The 40-year-old woman frequently uses e-commerce platforms, such as Tokopedia, or a grocery app called TaniHub, because she thinks she can buy quality products at cheaper prices.
“I prefer to buy fruit online,” she told The Jakarta Post recently. “I usually look for fruit with a specific label, such as Kojama avocados, because I’ve tried them and I thought the quality was good.”
Aside from demanding high-quality products, Laili said e-grocery shopping services were attractive with their many discounts and bundling programs.
Laili is only one of a growing number of Indonesians who enjoy shopping for groceries online, a new trend that is gaining popularity in Indonesia, according to the recently published Tetra Pak Index 2018.
The Tetra Pak Index, which focuses on investigating food shopping trends, is an annual study done in five countries, including the United States, China, England and Indonesia.
Based on the research, 1.2 percent of consumers in Jakarta purchased food online in 2016, and the figure is expected to climb to 5.4 percent by 2030.
“In Indonesia, traditional markets currently [still] play a big role, [but] the trend has shown that there will be a shift in purchasing behavior to online channels,” said Gabrielle Angriani, Tetra Pak Indonesia’s communication manager.
The study highlights that in 2015, Indonesia had 18 million consumers shopping online, with the number predicted to grow to 119 million consumers in 2020. This is because Indonesia has a big young population with increasing smartphone penetration and stronger economic growth, the study shows.
The research mentioned four factors that encouraged consumers to turn to e-grocery shopping, namely convenience, technology that enables faster speed of delivery, sustainability and personalization.
One example of personalization is the use of a sophisticated big data system, which is expected to attract more visitors to online grocery platforms. With big data, frequent customers get recommendations for products they may need to buy based on their previous orders.
Rahmat Danu Andika, Bukalapak associate vice president of O2O, concurred with the Tetra Pak research in saying his company’s e-commerce platform saw that at least 40 percent of its 50 million users had bought groceries.
Rahmat added that in the first half of 2018, Bukalapak was able to sell tens of millions of ready-to-drink products through its marketplace. On Bukalapak’s website, the top five most-purchased grocery items in the first six months of 2018 were milk, followed by chocolate, coffee, soap and tea.
“Milk is the number one product that people purchased,” he said, adding that many mothers preferred to buy milk in bulk online to avoid carrying heavy bags from the supermarket to their home.
An online grocery platform, HappyFresh, also found that milk was the most frequently purchased item among Indonesian users of its site, followed by fresh produce items such as vegetables, fruit and seafood.
“In terms of quantity, most of our customers do weekly grocery shopping. They purchase for themselves as well as for their family,” said Filippo Candrini, HappyFresh Indonesia managing director.
